I remember three things about my visit to Graceland. The sweet, yeasty smell of stubble fields that seemed to hang over the whole of Memphis. The surprisingly small scale of the mansion, which Elvis bought from a local printing family at the age of 22, so young he didn’t think twice about moving his parents in. And the garden at the end of the visit, with all those bodies in it. Black marble slabs: mum and dad (his mother died of alcoholism in his first burst of fame); his identical twin Jesse who died at birth, his grandmother, and Presley himself, who’s been there for 47 years.
It is called the meditation garden – all you can hear is a water fountain – but the slabs are shocking in a domestic setting. In the last five years, two more bodies have been added to the mass grave: Elvis’s grandson Ben Keough, his spitting image, who died in 2020 by suicide aged 27; and Ben’s mother – Elvis’s only child, Lisa Marie Presley, who managed to carry on for another two and a half years after her son died before she collapsed of a heart attack, her body weakened by drug abuse. She had been trying to write her memoir, speaking recollections into a machine, but she struggled with the process because “she wasn’t sure what her value was to the public, other than being Elvis’s daughter”.
The memoir tailed off, and after she died, her daughter Riley Keough – Ben’s sister and the mesmerising actress who played the Stevie Nicks-alike singer in the TV series Daisy Jones & the Six – lay in bed with the tapes and wrote them up, bringing the story to its inevitable end. In May this year, Riley fought against the sale of Graceland at auction, and she is now the sole heir. The glacial Priscilla, “Nona”, 79, is still alive and on a retainer of $100k per year. She will be allowed in the meditation garden when the time comes, granted a spot “closest to Elvis, without moving any existing gravesite”.
An Elvis fan once told me that the Presleys were the closest thing America had to a royal family, but they blew it – their personal problems were their downfall. This book, such a fast read, but heavy as a velvet curtain, is an American story through and through – from the first rock ’n’ roll star, the apex of the American dream, to the addiction to prescribed opioids that contributed to the destruction of Lisa Marie’s life.
There is nothing about the Elvis estate, short of a few mentions of the “Memphis Mafia” who surrounded him in the old days, very little on the music (both his and Lisa Marie’s), and the King is dead by page 62. But it may be the most important Elvis book, because it tells you all you need to know about the legacy of unregulated celebrity: it is a story of generational trauma, ungrieved death, unwieldy projections, superstition and foreboding. The Presley children – Lisa first, then Riley and Ben – lived enmeshed lives with parents they knew were going to die. That precariousness was constantly offset by intense connection, and magical experiences: at least once a week, someone gets a theme park closed down for a private party and the kids ride roller coasters over and over till dawn. For much of the book they’re having the time of their lives.
Lisa Marie, born on 1 February 1968, was much loved by Elvis. Priscilla had moved out of Graceland when Lisa Marie was four years old, and she shuttled between her parents; but Elvis was already reclusive, living at the top of the house, ringing a bell for his daughter. “I felt my father could change the weather,” she writes. “He had that thing where you could see his soul. If he was in a shitty mood, it was shitty outside; if it was storming, he was about to go off.” She lives in an atmosphere of indulgent lawlessness: she has her own golf cart as an infant, and many of her friends seem to live at Graceland too: they careen across the garden “decapitating” their vehicles by driving under fences; they turn off lights in the basement and hurl pool balls at each other. Elvis buys her a horse, and she rides it through the house.
The pain of Elvis’s daughter was that there was always a third party: his fans. As the first rock star, neither he nor his entourage had any idea how to deal with them, and, just as they are today, they were there – at the house – all the time. They would congregate in a churchyard next door, because no one could legally move them from consecrated land: Lisa Marie would drive by on her golf cart and yell “f*** you”. When Elvis died, they came into the house to see the body, which was stored there for two days, while she watched from between the banisters.
That blocked grief – having to share him, and then tiptoe down at night to sit with his corpse – shaped her psyche.“The sadness started at nine when he passed away and it never left,” she says. When her own son shot himself in 2020, increasingly depressed and worried for his mother’s declining health, she made a deal with the LA coroners to keep him on dry ice for two months at her home because she wanted another solitary communion. She seems always to be looking for such intensity. Back when the children were small, Lisa Marie had left their father, the musician Danny Keough, and married Michael Jackson after late-night conversations that took place over eight days in a Las Vegas hotel room. She did so – she is quite clear – because she felt she had found her father again; as the projections fell away, and Jackson’s addictions presented themselves, she found another side of her father too.
It is tempting to think of famous dynasties as lofty and cold; their privilege is alienating. But the Presleys were only ever victims of Elvis’s fame. Throughout Riley’s childhood, Lisa Marie would bundle them into a private jet and fly from LA to Memphis just to sleep in her father’s bed. The only problem with these thrilling slumber parties was that they couldn’t leave the room in the morning: tours were running downstairs, so they’d be trapped in there all day, ordering McDonald’s and flicking through the self-help books Elvis turned to at the end of his life. Could they not have had the place shut down for a few minutes in order to get out? No – it seems Graceland was bigger than all of them.
Keough is committed to showing Lisa Marie as a loving mother, and her own entries bring a stable, post-therapy clarity to a dark and wild story. It’s so gracefully done that you start to suspect she’s the first one to break free from it all. Her looks help – unlike her mother and brother, her face is her own, not Elvis’s. But projections go deep, they are part of our origin myths, and I did wonder whether she was conscious of the echoes in her own description of Lisa: “She was such a force that sometimes I really thought if she focused hard enough, thunderbolts would appear. She had an uncanny ability to see right into your soul.”
From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir
By Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough
Macmillan, 304pp, £25
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[See also: Liam Payne was a victim of the pop pin-up machine]
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This article appears in the 30 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, American Horror Story